


I Can't Stand You

by amnesiophilia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Comedy, Fluff and Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 13:17:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amnesiophilia/pseuds/amnesiophilia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A glimpse, by snippets, into the relationship between Tavros and Vriska.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Click-clack-clatter. That was how it went, dice on the table, and the slight jab of their pointed presence left in the palm of her hand.

The numbers were seven, seven, seven and eight. They hit the board just so, and knocked the little pewter beast-and-carriage over.

After a slight pause, a set of short, stubby fingers hesitated out onto the board, and righted the piece with a delicacy (as if sensible of its feelings) that made Vriska combine, in her throat, a hiss and a sigh.

“That’s twenty-nine spaces,” she informed Tavros. She watched him: he was counting them out in his head, and she could tell that he wasn’t multiplying, but just adding up one by one by one. “And I got triples so I get to go twice more. You’re really bad at this!”

Tavros looked dolefully at his piece, which was a small silvery troll with curved horns and a heroic-looking cloak, sitting at the starter position. Vriska, meanwhile (her figure was a tall-horned troll woman she’d hand-painted black and blue - she owned the set, and had played the game against herself just so many times) sat at the junction of Mount Misbegot and the Sluthering Wastes, where you could find treasure that would weigh down the little Scale of Judgement in the centre of the board so deeply it might take a pole and a ten-pound counterweight to lift it back up again.

“I don’t mean to question your, um, your authority is what might be said,” said Tavros, hitching on his vowels as if he was having a little fit ( _spaz_ , thought Vriska), “but if someone is just getting a one on their little uncertainty polygon over and over again, that doesn’t n-necessarily mean - “

“Trust me, Tavros,” said the girl shortly, giving him a look as she dabbed the wee Marquise Mindfang around the board for her several hundredth victory lap, picking up a little gold-coloured crown and a handful of fake amber beads from the treasure pile as she did. “Oh look, I defeated the Smiling Maw of Sluthertop! That’s gotta be worth another couple of priceless rubies.” Plastic gems were quickly scooped up from the communal chest and into the steadily-filling cup that stood by Vriska’s side of the board. Tavros’ cup was blue, and it was empty.

“Good job,” he said, with those big gawky eyes where she couldn’t tell if he was earnest or not, but of _course_ he was - right? - because he was _Tavros_. And that was the comforting thing about Tavros, as a friend. You could nearly ignore him, and just do whatever you wanted, and he would be there like wallpaper. “Um, so how do you defeat monsters, I might need to know for when I - “

“Well, it’s easy,” said Vriska abstractly, clicking down the last few paces of Mindfang’s translocatory journey. “See, like, _there_ , I used my _Cape of Witless Witticism_ for a plus two to my Charisma score, and then I used the Feint maneuver to lull the Maw into a false sense of security. After that its Steadfastness number was three points lower, so I could easily defeat it with my incredible Swordplay!”

Tavros frowned. His eyebrows were thick, caterpillary, and he had the beginnings of a kid-unibrow. It was not adorable. “But, and, when I say this, I don’t mean to question how good you are at this game which is obviously, very, but all I s-saw you do was pick up a card, look at it, and then put it in the used pile.”

“Well, I knew all the other stuff in my head,” said Vriska, giving him a funny look. “I mean, I’ve played this game a _lot _, Tavros. If I said out loud what I was doing every time, it would take like, twice as long!”__

Tavros seemed to consider this. “But now that I’m here,” he put forward hesitantly, “maybe it would be, a good thing to do, just to, explain it f-for my benefit?”

“Can’t you just pick it up from watching me?” said Vriska, obscurely irritated.

“N, no,” said Tavros with the world’s most frustratingly idiotic docility. She could slit his throat and he wouldn’t even moan! Oh, my God, what a boy.

“Alright,” she sighed, rolling her eyes so deeply they were buried in eyelash for a moment. “From now on, I’ll go over whatever I’m doing for you, _in detail _. Now take your fucking turn already!”__

Tavros rolled a one.

~

This was a part of the lab where no-one really ever went. Vriska liked it, and then again she didn’t: it was the kind of basement seclusion in which her lusus had thrived, that kind of dark musty corner-space that a spider could build in and feel fat and safe and private. Down the spiral staircase, one arm leaning against the rocky walls of the cave…when she was small she’d always hugged against the wall going down to see Mom, tracing her palm over the rugged, rocky striations and feeling their security, how firm they were. When she was just three sweeps old she’d punched the jagged rock, to see if she could break it; the supreme confidence in her own power to affect things had started that early. She couldn’t, of course.

Here, in the lab on the meteor in the Veil in the middle of the night and what _wasn’t_ the end of their adventure, despite what everyone thought - here, there was brushed metal and a ceiling so high, a floor so deep, that all there was above was the warm, mechanical shroud of utter darkness. You could hear thumping and buzzing from distant machines: the faint, workaday clank of footsteps very far away, echoing around the cavernous interiors like a note through a horn. The nearest living person might be a mile off from Vriska or more, but the space was so chambered, so resonant, that the sound of living creatures in it picked out an alto against its deep silence.

Her legs dangled over the side of a tall steel cliff. Who knew where it fell down to? You couldn’t see, and the way the sound travelled here, you couldn’t entirely tell whether any one clink or whisper came from above or below. She watched her shoes - pointed, red in a shade that set off orange nicely, coming up to her calves. Her heels kicked against the edge of the cliff, legs swaying restlessly. They looked so cool. When she’d gotten these shoes she’d practically danced a fucking jig. Kick. Kick. The dull clang didn’t echo much.

Behind her there was a grubtop computer. It was sitting with the top up, and on its display she had seventeen different windows open. Several of them were journal pages, scans she’d painstakingly made two sweeps ago of her ancestor’s fantastical life story. Others were Trollian brackets: little blue lines, dozens of little blue lines, all set up in a row. Some of them were old chatlogs. Why had she looked those up? The thought curled her stomach up in a torsion. _Why_ had she looked those up? It didn’t _do_ anything, it didn’t _help_ her. It was a pointless action. It pulled things backward, made them sit still.

She’d never really understood him. The thought passed over her for just a second, like a fleeting touch, and then it was gone. She couldn’t let it into herself, couldn’t countenance it, but the way it skimmed over her consciousness shook her. She thought about it for a few seconds more and then got angry at the fact that she was even considering it. Who cared? Who cared if she’d understood him or not, he certainly hadn’t understood _her_. Besides it was wrong: she _did_ understand him, perfectly fucking well! He was a weak moron with no brains, she’d amused herself with him for a while, had tried to uncover something good in him, to find even a single speck of you-are-worth- _fucking_ -bothering-with, and he’d finally shown her that she’d made a mistake by trying. That was all.

She realised that she was screwing up her face bitterly, and let out a slow breath, trying to ignore the heat under her skin and the pressure behind her eyes that hadn’t been there a few moments before. It was the ultimate embarrassment that she was letting Tavros, in any capacity, affect her this much.

~

The lance was long, and its point was sharp. It carried a helter-skelter stripe in chalky red and yellow, and if you bore into something with it going at a good pace, it seemed pretty likely you would go right through.

“Seemed” being the operative word, because Vriska had never seen its owner use it, and in fact she was pretty - infuriatingly, exasperatingly - confident that it never _had_ been used.

“Taaaavroooos!” she cried, whirling around one skinny hip in an expert roundhouse kick. The chunky red metal casement on her foot _clanged_ resoundingly, and the gawping, calciferous visage of the chalk lich jolted sideways on its spine, its jaw juddering wider as if in slavering remark. It was still advancing, crooked knees and spindly arms keeping up their decrepit gait as though whatever happened to the head was the problem of another country. A second closed in from behind, and she could see the bright, thoughtless eyes of a third glimmering up from where it had been crouched behind an outcropping of rock, waiting for adventurers in ambush. “ _Pick up the fucking lance_!”

She could spare a wild glance backwards, just, and that was how she saw the scraggy-haired young boy at the mouth of the cave, spine so straight with agitation that he was half-elevated out of his no-wheel device on his elbows, eyes as wide as saucers, tapping away on his PDA.

“ _Taaaavroooos_!”

“I, I’m, I, it’s that I’m going to, which is,” he panted, scrabbling on keys, “message Kanaya! Or A, Aradia, maybe she and Equius, or, what I mean to say is, Equius and um, she, can come and help us…!”

“Pick up the _fucking_ lance!” Vriska aimed a punch at one ribcage, her bony knuckles impacting so hard they stang with blood under the skin, a vapour of choking, white dust billowing off the point of impact. It didn’t seem to do much damage; the lich didn’t even recoil, this time.

He shook his head wildly. “I can’t! Vriska, these enemies are, are too high level, or, to say, we’re not ready in our quest to _face_ them yet and, maybe we should, wait or we could, uh, _retreat_ …!”

“I’m boxed in,” hissed Vriska, whirling around to face the lich behind her just as its long, superannuated arms made to grab at her own. The movement threw its aim; shrugging off the cold, scratchy feeling of its nails drifting past her skin, she measured up, thinking as fast as she could, trying in her mind to imagine where the weak point of a monster like this might be. She could draw for her dice, but the Fluorite Octet had quickly been outclassed as their session’s prototyping chain had grown quickly more ridiculous, and now even the weakest monsters were immune to all but the rarest and most unlikely of their randomised effects. As a move, it’d be a gamble. The ceiling was too low to fly… “ _You_ can retreat, Tavros, I can’t. So what is it? Troll or coward?”

“The question that you’re, uh, asking,” stammered Tavros, reaching for the ever-present, never-useful lance where it was propped up against the cave’s rocky lip, “maybe doesn’t seem, the fairest, of the questions that could be asked, given, uh, that maybe I have more than two options, and, there’s something else that, maybe, I could do - “

“Please, enlighten me!” she shouted furiously, lowering her head to duck a swipe that came on the wings of a decaying groan. This wasn’t pleasant. These monsters seemed like dead things, and that made Vriska really angry, because of _course_ they weren’t dead things, the game had made them up, and so her feeling claustrophobic and terrified in a deep tight ball suddenly as she remembered being surrounded by ghosts was just another shitty trick and she was a sucker for being unable to stop herself falling for it. They just seemed _so_ dead…but they didn’t have any horns. Her heart pumped, braced by the resolution. Real dead people would have horns.

That was when one grabbed her. Its dust-caked arms wrapped around her midsection, the claws of a second ripping at her shirt, and she shrieked, a terrible angry fearful sound that just came out of her like a hiccup. She wasn’t talking to Tavros any more. Tavros was fucking _useless_ , why had she ever decided to hang _out_ with this loser, why wasn’t she adventuring with…no, not her…or him…her once, but not anymore…

A cold feeling in Vriska’s throat predicted tears. Great, Serket, she chided herself, a tiny little critical voice that seemed calm and snide as she’d ever been suddenly appearing in the back of her skull. You don’t have any friends so now you’re going to die. You brought Tavros with you to fight monsters because apparently you think you’re some kind of saint and it’s your job to heal the worthless. Great. If you hadn’t fucked up over and over and over again like a pro, maybe Terezi could have been here. Or Kanaya. Maybe even Aradia! Pretty sure she used to be good with a whip, before, you know! The big one! Good job on that, by the way, and here the voice became sincere. That was _really_ well done. One of your best plays ever. In fact, given you’re being strangled to death right now, it’s probably going to go down as number one of all time. It’s not Mindfang’s legacy, but hey, compared to the hum-drum achievements of the jerks who’ll be around to remember it, it’s a golden fucking pyramid in the stars!

“Aghhcch,” said Vriska, as a dull rushing noise swelled in her ears. That was blood, right? Going…somewhere, or away from…somewhere…in her body. The important part was that her brain wasn’t getting any of it, or her heart, or something. One of those would kill her. She thought. She couldn’t think very well suddenly; thinking was hard. She could feel the rigid ossefaction of the chalk lich’s long digits clamped around her windpipe, squeezing the life out of her. One of her legs was kicking uncontrollably, but she could barely feel it, it had gone away from her. Idly, numbly, she rolled her bulging eye down and counted the fingers strangling her. One, two, three…only four to a hand. So that made…eight. So that was nice.

If the rushing noise was blood, why did it sound like it was getting… _closer_ …?

The rocket chair barrelled through the liches, a halo of fire belting from its exhaust, and Tavros in the middle of it holding up his lance two-handed and with no idea of form at all, just jutting it out in front of himself like a fence-post. His mouth was a great open oval filled with fangs. Dimly, punctuating a noise like the distant keening of wind, Vriska heard the remote _crunch_ of the lance’s point bearing through two ribcages in a row, the _thunk_ of the third being smashed aside by the careening bulk of Tavros’ ridiculous vehicle.

She fell bodily to the floor. The pressure of the eight choking fingers seemed less, air slipping fickly through her throat, and with a start, she realised that while the claw was still loosely clasped around her neck, the arm it was attached to had been thrown from the body. The sound came back into her ears, and she realised that Tavros had been screaming.

 _THUNK_. He hit the far wall of the cave and his terrified, half-yell battle wail didn’t stop, just heightened. Parts and pieces of dry, bloodless chalk lich were everywhere: white limbs, scattered jaws, little beads of eyes like shrivelled stone, the cold light going out of them quickly. After a few weighty seconds - Vriska struggling to her feet, trying to find her equilibrium, her vision blacking out for several heartbeats then dizzily phasing back in - the whole thing popped and turned to grist.

Tavros’ wail twisted breathily off into nothing. His chair was on its side, its wedge-like nose all bent metal and exposed engine parts, and he was sticking out of the cockpit sideways, stunned. As Vriska watched, he began to struggle up into an awkward sitting position, heaving his arms galumphingly against the no wheel device’s chunky siding for support.

It had had a loud, bell-clear sound to it, the grist pop, and more to say it was very recognisably a sound _effect_. It was a ding!, though not quite the dinner-is-ready! ding you got when you levelled up - more of a melodic, congratulatory chime. Congratulations! Your blood is re-oxygenating and your Strangle Forfenditure statistic has increased by two points; you approach the fabled and also probably meaningless rank “Light Fingers”. After that you may be pleased to be titled “Boxcar Magnate”, which will at a later date concede to be replaced by the stunningly inane “Queen Twoquads”. It just went on and on and on…!

Vriska dismissed the internal popup. Then, despite herself, she broke out in a grin. This game might be pretty fucking stupid, but they’d still just beaten what appeared to be a really difficult part of it, probably way earlier than they’d been supposed to. That was a bubbly, fizzy, I-just-stole-something feeling that she would never for a second be able to frown about.

“Tavros!” she called, approaching him, her step finding its customary swing with just a few moments’ grace. “You did it! I have to say I never expected you to, even though I always told you that I did, but I guess you went and proved me wrong. Wow! What a turn-up for the books, am I right? Hapless nerd defeats all the big, bad monsters, finds his inner courage, earns the respect of his high-flying superior?” She tossed her hair, quite aware that it was a pose, but loving the pose anyway - it had flair. Her fangs were bright as treasure. “That’s a pretty good story! Certainly way better than “hapless nerd is a big useless lump, lets the hot girl die because he needs to ask Kanaya what he should do”.” She rolled her eyes reflexively. Even if he had managed to pull it out of the fire, she wasn’t going let him forget _that_ any time soon. “Hey, I bet now that you can actually fight we can start two-manning a lot of the harder dungeons - “

“Actually, uh, Vriska,” said Tavros quietly, his dazed, dizzy eyes cow-like as he turned to face her, “The thing to say, is, that, I didn’t, uh, know that the thing which turned out to be the thing that happened, uh, was that thing.” His eyes drifted subvertedly to his PDA, fallen (screen bright and crowded with messages) in the recess of his chair’s foot-well. A little beep heralded the arrival of one or two more.

Vriska frowned at it sharply, all the toss gone out of her hair in an instant. “What does _that_ mean?”

“I didn’t know that the happening thing,” said Tavros dreadfully, “was going to be what, uh, occurred, or, I guess you could say, transpired. I just, uh, I picked up my lance, because that was what, you were telling me to do, and then Equius said he sent me, uh, a program - “

“Wait,” said Vriska, in a new and unsalutary species of disbelief, “ _Equius_ did this? I owe _Equius_ for the big win here?” She did not mention that he had apparently saved her life. She was already doing her utmost best to forget it.

“Equius actually,” said Tavros with a ruminant motion of his jaw, “didn’t want to talk to me, for, the reasons that he usually has, but, I, posted in a memo that, I needed help, and, uh, Nepeta saw it and she thought Equius could help, and, which is the case that it turns out as, that, she was, totally and really, helpfully, correct.” He smiled. Vriska stared at it - a thin-lipped, jaggy-toothed, totally gormless expression of happiness - feeling cold and angry. Did he not get it? What he’d done was about the deepest and most public admission of weakness he could make and he was _proud_ of it. This was like a hoofbeast rolling in its own excreta. She’d thought, for a lunatic second, that he’d stepped up. No! She must have been fucking brain-dead, probably from the strangulation. The very moment she’d thought she’d seen that Tavros might have _done_ something, she should have been asking herself the whereabouts of the invisible person who was actually responsible.

“Tavros,” she said quietly, their mutual corona of grist slowly depleting as slight movement of their bodies, just breathing, just looking at each other - brought them close enough for it to pop into their inventories, “I don’t want you to talk to me until you’ve done something that I will think is worth talking about.”

Two days later, he finally won a game of Conqueror’s Crown. Until then, they were some pretty chilly times on the Land of Maps and Treasure.


	2. Chapter 2

The outside swell of the wave on the shore, and the bank of the ship, and the salty lacquered wood of the deck - lacquer is not a type of varnish, but a type of hardness that is put onto a ship like a shell, and when it shines it’s buff and lets the grain through - with the let-through grain of the deck under their feet they could stand here comfortably.

Vriska could, anyway. Tavros was digging in the sand.

“I’m building,” he called up to her, “a grain fortress.” Her feet were bare. She watched the granularity, lightly shining, like tiny gems or pieces of cut glass pasted over microscopically with grit, of the sand sifting between his coarse grey fingers. He was sunny here. It was sunny, here. It was strange, a day that was balmy, and not stark. By rights the skin should have been peeling from their backs. Instead she just felt a soothing, swelling, flow-and-ebbing heat, like a hive’s thermal concourse. On the tips of her aural nodes she heard the gurgling wind, merry-off somewhere else, just at the edges of what was real and cogent for the moment.

“You’re such a child,” she called back to him lazily, meaning it, but not very hard. He grinned. The audacity to grin, at that! His teeth were very white in the bright and he carried it off quite nicely, for once - for once or twice or three times, recently, a laugh - she thought that his fangs looked longer or at least more sharp.

“It’s going to be, what I think I would safely call, great,” he sang upwards, turning his head to the task and tipping it up so the goofy growing-out plumes of his mohawk flopped backwards in the sun.

“Are you going to have a rampart?” she called down drifting with her arms going forth to fold on the baluster. “Every good castle’s got a rampart.”

Tavros shrugged, she couldn’t see him, she could guess he was still grinning. Something about the way the black material of his shirt shone, at one shoulder, as he shrugged it. “Um, sure.” His hands were scooping hollows in the sand and by the sides of the hollows he was structuring lumps that were about to be shapes. “We can have a rampart.”

“When did this become a group project, Nitram?” shot Vriska back, this time not meaning it, and so harder than she did. He knew that. By now.

“Uh, I guess when you got so super fucking interested in it,” came the winsome, fluctuating voice, which here sounded no more reedy than the far-off wind. “Um, and to call you by your last name too to show disrespect, I guess, _Serket_.”

She laughed out loud. It was a low murmuring sound because when Vriska found something really funny that wasn’t hard and cruel and all hers like a steel box, she didn’t have a laugh to go to for it. That standing, it just came out of her throat like the nicker of a horse. It was deep and quite breathy and split its airways with her nose.

It was a pretty okay laugh to laugh. In her book. If you asked her.

After that he would put a beast repository there, she knew, clambering across the ship’s bows and down a wind-warm rope ladder the rough ties of which fricted the soles of her uncovered feet, sinking into sand to the knuckles, a delicious feeling, her legs bending as she came down, her arms plumping like the upwards beat of a struck pillow. She pulled off her shirt to stop it from gathering sweat, and threw it into the grasp of the wind. She’d find herself wearing a new one, if she wanted, if she felt like it. It blew off, the sound of the wind touching the dark grey fabric a new one in the tableau, a cherishing blowing cosseting sound like fabric running through a quick organic press. The way the wind caught it curled; Tavros looked sidelong at the distant garment fluttering, like a gull, like a bird, and Vriska didn’t. Instead she marched on down to meet him. She could already see the forming shape, the sloping roof (on a real fortress it would have been bundled straw) of the beast repository.

“I’m doing a beast repository here,” he said, shaping off a lump on the roof with his careful thumb, and just as she was about to say, I _know_ , he said with a grin, “and then after that we can have a tower with barred windows.”

Which was just what she wanted.

~FIN~


End file.
